Australia’s highest-level government inquiry has opened public hearings into the December 2025 antisemitic mass shooting at a Hanukkah gathering near Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach, an attack that left 15 people dead and stands as the country’s deadliest mass shooting in three decades. The federal royal commission, led by former judge Virginia Bell, was convened to unpack the systemic and contextual factors that paved the way for the attack carried out by two gunmen: Sajid Akram, who was killed by police during the assault, and his 24-year-old Australian-born son Naveed Akram, who remains in prison awaiting trial on 15 murder charges and terrorism offenses.
In her opening address to the inquiry, Bell emphasized that the sharp rise in antisemitic hostility recorded across Australia in recent years has mirrored trends across other Western nations, with the surge directly tied to escalating conflict in the Middle East. “It’s important that people understand how quickly those events can prompt ugly displays of hostility towards Jewish Australians simply because they are Jews,” Bell stated, noting the inquiry would center the long-building escalation of what has been called “one of society’s oldest hatreds.”
Counsel assisting the inquiry Zelie Hegen confirmed the commission has already received thousands of public submissions detailing the widespread harm of rising antisemitism across the country. Witness testimony over the opening days centered on the gradual shift in open antisemitism that began shortly after the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the outbreak of the Gaza war, a shift community members say allowed long-suppressed bigotry to move into the public sphere.
Sheina Gutnick, whose father Reuven Morrison was among those killed in the Bondi attack, told the commission her refugee parents had met and built a life at Bondi Beach, a place that once held generations of happy family memories. “Now Bondi holds a really, really heavy weight in our community’s heart,” she said.
Witnesses detailed a steady escalation of antisemitic incidents across Australia’s major cities in the two years leading up to the Bondi shooting. In the 12 months following the October 2023 Opera House protest against the Gaza war, where antisemitic chants were broadcast nationwide, Australian Jewish community groups recorded 2,062 antisemitic incidents — a surge that left parents afraid to send their children to Jewish schools. That summer saw a string of arson and graffiti attacks targeting synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses in Sydney and Melbourne.
One witness, a woman working with a Jewish security organization, described escorting congregants to safety from a Melbourne synagogue on the 2023 anniversary of the Nazi Kristallnacht pogrom, after a masked mob of roughly 30 black-clad protesters arrived at the site. A Jewish woman whose grandparents survived the Holocaust told the inquiry she was stunned to witness flag burning at the 2023 Opera House protest, calling the open display of bigotry “such an un-Australian thing.” She added she was “incredibly disappointed that police hadn’t stepped in before things got as bad as they did,” urging broader Australian society to take Jewish community concerns seriously when members warn “history is repeating itself.”
Alex Ryvchin, chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, who migrated to Australia from Ukraine as a child, told the inquiry many of the Bondi victims were part of a tight-knit community of Soviet refugees who built new lives in Australia. “They were patriots who loved this country,” he said of the friends he lost in the attack. Ryvchin detailed a January 2025 firebomb attack on his former family home, an incident that marked a dangerous escalation of antisemitic violence by targeting a private residence. “We were on a path to catastrophe,” he said, noting he continues to receive regular death threats and was forced to send his children out of the city for safety ahead of the December attack. “That was January; by December on that same road, three kilometres down, there was a horrific massacre that has transformed us permanently.”
Several witnesses appearing before the inquiry were granted pseudonyms over well-founded fears of violent reprisal, underscoring the persistent climate of fear facing Australian Jewish communities months after the deadly attack.